Chapter 6 - ‘This is the copy’

Summary

Chapter 6 considers the scribes’ copying of the text itself in the fifteenth century, especially in works by Thomas Hoccleve and Geoffrey Chaucer and spurious lines added to Chaucer’s poetry. It queries the assumption that scribes vary the text a lot, and in three quantitative samples it suggests that, despite the difficulties of transcription and the acceptability of revision, scribes could copy exemplars very closely. As a result, despite the material differences between books, what most distinguished them was verbal likeness. It suggests that this reproduction reflects an interest in the text’s survival as an immaterial, verbal artefact, partly out of respect for certain kinds of English poetry, and a disregard for its material form.